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7 Best practices for recruitment marketing automation

December 12, 2022
 
iCIMS Staff
4 min read

For decades, automation technology has been used in B2B sales and marketing to streamline communications and drive business growth. Until recently, marketing automation technology was unheard of in the world of recruiting and talent acquisition.

Eighty-one percent of companies agree that recruitment marketing looks different since the pandemic, with recruiters realizing the importance of a strong employer brand. Recruiters are using automation technology to help attract and engage top talent.

Keep reading as we cover the seven best practices for recruitment marketing automation and how recruiters are using it to amplify their recruitment marketing strategies.

 

7 best practices for recruitment marketing automation

1. Nurture candidates

Traditionally recruiters begin sourcing candidates once there is a vacancy to be filled. Today, we know that a short-term mentality can cause long-term recruiting challenges.

Nurturing candidates before they are ready to apply is key in creating sustainable methods of talent acquisition. Through automated campaign workflows, recruitment marketing automation offers personalized candidate nurture, at scale.

Recruitment marketing automation helps recruiters engage candidates with content tailored to their interests, ensuring a steady pipeline of hire-ready talent in their database.

 

2. Refresh your database

Creating personalized content takes time, so you want to know it is reaching the right candidates. Research shows that email databases naturally degrade by 22.5% every year. If you’re not regularly updating candidate information, you may be missing the opportunity to engage with your top candidate.

Running regular nurture campaigns with a CTA to “update your details” allows engaged candidates to amend their job title, company or location. Not only does this revive your database but it ensures candidates are receiving content that they are interested in. It’s a win-win.

Refreshing your candidate database is key to engaging qualified candidates for your roles.

 

Man wearing an orange safety vest stands in a warehouse.

3. Automate actions

Using tracking and scoring, recruitment marketing automation allows you to automate actions based on candidate intent. Tracking engagement across your company’s digital footprint means recruiters have access to extensive candidate information.

How can you engage candidates without knowing which content interests them most? Knowledge like this puts you miles ahead of the competition, allowing you to engage candidates at a higher level.

Automated actions not only offer true personalization, but significantly cut down on manual human time.

 

4. Maintain a healthy database

Removing inactive candidates allows for a healthy database. Purging those inactive email addresses helps ensure high engagement and open rates.

How each organization classifies an inactive email address varies. Whether it’s been 3, 6 or 12 months since a candidate last interacted with your content, eliminate them from the database so you can focus on candidates who are interested in what you have to say.

 

5. Prioritize candidate engagement

When deciding on an engagement score for each action, prioritizing characteristics that indicate a readiness to talk is key. Identifying the characteristics of your best candidates and the most likely triggers that get a conversation going allows you to prioritize the most important actions to score in the candidate scoring model.

For instance, you may find that video content works best at creating conversations with your talent pool. Setting a higher engagement score for video click-throughs allows you to prioritize this action.

Once candidate scoring is in place, you can continuously tell which candidates are most interested. This can help you cut time to shortlist by 50%.

 

Woman checks her phone on a train.

6. Iterate and update

In any campaign, it’s important to ensure you are assessing what works and what doesn’t. A nurture campaign is no different. Throughout the campaign, report on stats like click-throughs and open rates to assess which content your candidates enjoy most, which subject lines work and the tone of voice your candidates relate to.

A nurture campaign can be ongoing, so this means iteration is critical.

 

7. Instantly alert recruiters

The best candidates are only on the market for ten days. Recruiters need to act fast to secure top talent. With marketing automation, you can automate a step to notify recruiters the moment a candidate hits the hire-ready threshold.

Ensuring rapid outreach when a candidate becomes qualified with automatic task notifications means that no candidate is missed.

 

Solve your recruiting challenges with marketing automation technology

The world of recruitment is constantly evolving, and the pandemic has changed how we recruit. Recruitment marketing automation is leading the way forward with a solution like no other. Want to know more? Download our ebook here.

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